Red Hat and Mirantis battle in the OpenStack market and VMware needs to find a way into the fight

Ron Miller | July 23, 2014

Welcome to the Short Stack, our weekly feature where we search for the most intriguing OpenStack links to share with you. These links may come from traditional publications or company blogs, but if it's about OpenStack, we'll find the best links we can to share with you every week. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing.

If you wanted proof that Red Hat is serious about OpenStack, look no further than its purchase of Inktank in April. Just months after acquiring the company, Red Hat has already turned around an enterprise release of Inktank Ceph. Red Hat says it's all part of an overall strategy to be an OpenStack powerhouse and bringing enterprise-class software defined storage to OpenStack via Ceph is a big part of that.

While Red Hat has made its desire to dominate OpenStack clear, the rest of the industry isn't sitting idly and ceding anything to them. Last week, Mirantis announced a deal with Oracle to sell OpenStack services to Oracle Linux and VM customers. It's part of a larger strategy by Mirantis to team with corporate players. Last month, Mirantis announced a similar deal with IBM.

And speaking of Mirantis, the company is clearly making a concerted effort to blunt Red Hat's growing influence on the OpenStack community. In this podcast interview, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel talks about Mirtantis' role in the community and the growing demand for OpenStack in Europe.

As companies like Red Hat and Mirantis exert growing influence on the quickly evolving OpenStack community, Wall Street has taken notice and VMware is a company that has to evolve to continue to stay relevant. This article suggests that VMware could find the next growth path by embracing and conquering the OpenStack market.

In this case, the author is talking about OpenStack as an open source project and how you manage that and the changing needs of users. He wonders whether the project could benefit from more management, and concludes it's a double-edged sword. It could gain and lose something by having more tightly controlled management, but changing community needs could drive whether tighter management of the project is warranted.